PARIS: While politicians and scientists are seeking to understand how quickly the planet is warming, many of the world’s chief executives already are feeling the heat to solve one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century.

“You’d better learn to make money from climate change or you’ll be eaten for lunch,” warned Paul Dickinson of the Carbon Disclosure Project, a group in London that monitors the readiness of companies to tackle global warming for investors managing assets worth about $31 trillion.

With evidence of climate change mounting, and ever louder calls to regulate emissions and energy efficiency, investors from bankers to fund managers to insurers are trying to find out “which industry is future-proof,” Dickinson said.

The impact of climate change is among the agenda-topping items at the annual World Economic Forum this week in Davos, Switzerland, yet another sign that company executives are seeking answers even as engineers and policy makers scramble for solutions.

“Public concern about the problem of climate change is dramatically higher than in past years,” said David Victor, a professor at Stanford Law School who is scheduled to speak at the forum.

The problem for business, Victor said, is that “the public and government are not sure what to do or how much all this will cost,” making it “a very confusing time for companies.”

Some business leaders insist that the global muddle over climate change should be no obstacle to creating low- carbon business models.

Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT Group, said initiatives by the telecommunications company like requiring suppliers to reduce the amount of carbon they emit could help BT satisfy similar demands from its own customers, creating an eco-friendly “chain reaction” within clusters of businesses.

Voluntary approaches like that could help stop climate change from becoming “an issue of taxation and regulation,” said Verwaayen, who is also a scheduled speaker at the forum.

But not all companies are able to move as decisively as BT. And unlike Verwaayen, some business leaders are emphasizing the need for more rather than less regulation.

“That’s a new flip,” said Nick Robins, head of sustainable and responsible investment funds at Henderson Global Investors in London. “Many far-sighted CEOs are getting involved on the public policy level and becoming advocates of business-friendly but environmentally robust regulations.”

To meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union began capping the amounts of carbon emissions from industries in January 2005. In the United States, states in the northeast and California are developing similar policies. But the Bush administration refused to sign the Kyoto accord in 2001 and so far has resisted any form of mandatory laws on heavy polluters.

Business leaders complain that the legal limbo in the United States as well as weaknesses in the fledgling European system means that incentives to take advantage of current and emerging technologies reducing carbon emissions still are too weak.

“If we knew what the road map was, we could better plan the trip,” said James Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a power company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, that is the third-largest coal user in the United States.

“It’s difficult to plan right now,” added Rogers, who is one of a number of American business leaders who have called on the U.S. government to put mandatory caps on carbon output and create more uniform nationwide rules so that companies can work out now how much to invest in expensive new technologies.

Philippe Joubert, executive vice president of Alstom, a French builder of power plants, said he expected his company to be ready with large-scale versions of technologies that captured and stored carbon under the ground or deep in the ocean by 2012.

So-called carbon capture and storage is increasingly seen by some climate change experts as a key technology for the 21st century because it could allow societies to continue burning fossil fuels like coal, but sequester the emissions that warm the planet.

Like Rogers, Joubert said the United States and Europe still needed to do much more to encourage companies to build “capture-ready” plants during the current investment cycle so that these facilities could be easily adapted later. Joubert also said new legislation might be needed to ensure that plans to bury massive amounts of carbon dioxide near communities and in the oceans meet minimal resistance.

Big polluters already have successfully reduced levels of sulfur dioxide blamed for acid rain.

But the gradual nature of climate change creates new dilemmas for industry as executives weigh whether it is worth investing when the worst effects could still be decades away.